Elon Musk continues his personal crusade to make Twitter his favorite social network; after all, he paid $44 billion for it. Along the way, it breaks the Twitter app, starts a lot of discussions, and scares off a lot of advertisers.
[Cómo descargar tus datos y tweets de Twitter, “por si acaso” ahora que Elon Musk la ha comprado]
The latest novelty, of course, has caused controversy, because it is not clear who it is aimed at. This is a view counter, which now appears at the bottom of all tweets in the Android app and the official site.
Twitter view counter
The new Twitter counter is yet another small number that we can see growing, appearing alongside the number of retweets, number of quoted tweets, and number of likes. According to the company, these three figures were not enough to know our true reach, and that is why they directly included the number of times the message was seen.
The Twitter view counter is another number to keep in mind.
As usual in the news featured by Musk, this feature is not really new: users could already see the number of impressions of their own tweets, simply by going to their profile and clicking on each tweet. So the only difference is that this number is now public and is still displayed and therefore it is used to compare users and tweets.
However, there are several good reasons why you shouldn’t mess with Musk and skip that number if you can.
1st: What you think counts doesn’t count
You may think that this number can be useful, since it allows you to know the reach of your tweets and therefore the number of people who read them. But in reality, that’s not what that number counts.
The number of views on Twitter is not new, but until now it was somewhat hidden
The view count includes all times the tweet appeared in a user’s app. This includes: times it appears on the main app screen, times it appears in Twitter search, times it appears when someone enters our user profile, times it appears when the tweet is embedded in a web page, and many more. Therefore, this number may increase simply because someone has entered your profile to see who you are and the tweet in question appears first because it is the last one you have posted so far.
let the number go up does not necessarily mean that someone has read your tweet and therefore it is much less useful than one would think.
2nd: This is an inflated number
In fact, just because the number is growing doesn’t mean your tweet has reached more people. This is because Twitter counts all views, even if they repeat themselves. In other words, if someone sees your tweet twice, they are counted on both occasions. Just because a tweet has 10,000 views doesn’t mean 10,000 people read it, or even 10,000 people saw it. It is very likely that there are far fewer; We don’t know because, oddly enough, Twitter decides not to show true unique views data.
The Twitter counter doesn’t actually count every person who reads your posts.
Omicron
Even more: your own views are also counted. So, if you posted a tweet and see that someone read it, we regret to inform you that this view was yours; and of course, that also counts every time you’ve seen the tweet yourself, whether that’s on your profile, on your own home screen, or anywhere. It’s easy to see how the numbers can get bigger and bigger in just a few minutes.
3rd: It’s probably all a lie
Even taking all of this into account, you might think that this counter might be useful in some cases. What if I told you that the number is most likely completely invented?
There are already several public experiments showing that the number of views on tweets automatically increases even if no one sees them. The most popular is @StrayDogNZ’s experiment, who created a new account, made it private and locked it so no one could follow her or see her tweets, and posted a message.
I call bullshit on Views –
I logged out of this alt, came back 5 minutes later and suddenly there were 8 more views. pic.twitter.com/fqjZhY9tq6— Nick (@StrayDogNZ) December 23, 2022
As if by magic, the tweet immediately gained 10 views; and when the user closed their account and logged back in 5 minutes later, they had gained 8 more views.
It is possible that Twitter doesn’t count each view separately, and it is logical that this is not the case; given the absurd number of tweets posted daily and the number of people reading them, this is something that can easily overload the company’s servers.
These experiments might show that instead of sending every unique view to the server, the app would calculate an approximate number of views based on other data, such as the number of followers, retweets and the time that has passed, but these are speculations which, at the moment, have not been confirmed.
4th: It is not good or useful for you
Even though we accept this figure as real and true, we do not recommend that you pay too much attention to it. It’s not good for your sanity to begin with. Many content creators warn against focusing too much on viewership because we risk changing our habits and mindset to increase viewership.
Musk has incentives for the number to grow. you, not so much
Omicron
This is surely Musk’s intention: that people take these numbers seriously and try to create more viral tweets, more shared content which, in turn, generates more ad revenue for the business. But unless you want to start a “Twitter career” as a content creator, this number isn’t really useful for a mainstream user; This is the reason why, until now, this number was hidden and accessible only to the creators of each tweet. By going public, Musk wants Twitter users to compete, but the winner will be just him.
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